Abstract
It is by way of the call that one is enabled to wake up to responsibility. What is the illocutionary mood of the ‘call’ of conscience, though? Is this transcendental enabler of responsibility an imposing demand or an invitational question? Both Levinas and Heidegger emphasize the impositional character of the call(er) in conscience. The call seems to be the very essence of imperatives. I develop an apology for questioning by way of appeal to crumbs scattered throughout Jewish traditions as well as throughout the works of Levinas and Heidegger. Perhaps we are invited to be rather than told to be.
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Notes
As Nietzsche writes, ‘Everywhere [responsibility] is sought, it is usually the instinct for punishing and judging which seeks it. One has deprived becoming of its innocence if being in this or that state is traced back to will, to intentions, to accountable acts: the doctrine of the will has been invented [primarily] for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty…’ (Nietzsche 1990, p. 63). Cf. Nietzsche 2008, pp. 65–74; and Nietzsche 2001, §§114–117, 122, 273–275.
Cf. Freud 1961, pp. 11–21.
Cf. Berling 1987.
Jesus, for example, is depicted asking over three hundred questions throughout the Gospels. The classical literatures of Chan, and the normative models of Zen practice emerging from that literature, are permeated with questions as well. I have addressed this elsewhere (Dickman 2016a).
For broader historical context of reflection on conscience in Western thought, particularly in ethics, see Sorabji 2014. In contrast to Sorabji, I am here concerned more with the ontologically constitutive character of the call of conscience than with the morally constitutive character of the call.
As Searle writes, ‘There are… five general categories of illocutionary acts. We tell people how things are (Assertives), we try to get people to do things (Directives), we commit ourselves to doing things (Commissives), we express our feelings and attitudes (Expressives), and we bring about changes in the world through our utterances (Declarations)’ (Searle 1979, viii). See also Austin 1976 and Searle 1969.
Cf. Stenström 1984, p. 39.
See also Hintikka 1976, p. 22.
Cf. Butler 1997.
Since this forms the basic theme of this essay, it will be elaborated further below. See especially the section on Heidegger on the constitutive character of the call.
Below we will see that this dimension of the call more adequately accounts for the divine word in creation.
I have addressed this aspect of Speech Act approaches to questions (Dickman 2009b).
As Heidegger writes, ‘Speaking is at the same time also listening [my emphasis]. It is the custom to put speaking and listening in opposition: one [person] speaks, the other listens. But listening accompanies and surrounds not only speaking such that takes place in conversation…. Speaking is of itself a listening [my emphasis]. Speaking is listening to the language which we speak. Thus, it is a listening not while but before we are speaking. The listening to language also comes before all other kinds of listening that we know, in a most inconspicuous manner. We do not merely speak the language—we speak by way of it. We can do so solely because we have already listened to the language’ (Heidegger 1982a, b, pp. 123–124; my emphasis). We inherit a language, participating in a form of life, and we add to the language by our responses to what and with what we inherit.
This is what teachers expect in active learning from students, that their active engagement includes asking questions. The questions are among the teacher’s clues that students are listening (or not, depending on the character of their questions!).
He writes, ‘The insufficiency of the needy [one is] precisely in that it does not entirely possess its being and consequently is not strictly speaking separate’ (ibid.).
For further elaboration on this, see Levinas 1989, where he writes, alluding to the surplus of the burning bush, ‘The “less” is forever bursting open, unable to contain the “more” that it contains, in the form of “the one for the other”’ (p. 209).
Recall here Chretien on the ontological function of the call: the call creates respondent; springing into being, we answer (2004, pp. 16–17).
In English, the serpent apparently asks the first question (Genesis 3:1), ‘Did God really say: You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?’ In the Hebrew, this might not be a question. See White 1991, p. 130; and Brown et al. 2007, pp. 64–65. In only 5 cases of אַף, out of over 50 other uses, does it seem to work as an interrogative particle. However, in the majority of these instances, it also serves to make the statement an exaggeration. Considered in this way, the serpent, then, attempts to provoke his interlocutor, Isha (אִשָׁה), to put her on the defensive through deliberate overstatement of the biblical God’s prohibition, and thus attempts to draw out a reaction. Alter, for instance, translates the serpent’s statement as follows, ‘Though God said, you shall not eat from any tree in the garden—’ (Alter 2004, p. 24). Isha interrupts the serpent in order to correct him. Deliberate overstatement in a challenging tone does not constitute a question. Thus, rather than the serpent, it seems to be the biblical God who poses the very first question in the entirety of the Hebrew Bible.
Early in his analysis of the hermeneutic priority of the question, Gadamer briefly distinguishes between roughly four kinds of questions in order to show that only one of these kinds truly counts as a genuine question. For Gadamer, whereas pedagogical questions have no questioner, rhetorical questions have neither a questioner nor an object in question. Moreover, ‘slanted questions’—or what we may be more familiar with as ‘loaded questions’—are matters that have already been decided, and so are not really questions. These three—the pedagogical, the rhetorical, and the slanted question—are, for Gadamer, not real questions. It is only ‘real’ questions that count as having hermeneutic priority. See Gadamer 2004, pp. 357–358. Cf. Fenves 1993, p. 21.
Consider, for example, the game of Twenty Questions. Technological advances have led to the automation of questioning technologies such as with the popular hand-held game called “20Q.” This game is a version of the traditional game of 20 questions, but instead of playing against another person, it is a computer that asks the questions in order to figure out what the human player is thinking. The inventor claims that the internet version of the game of the same name manifests artificial intelligence. See ‘About Us,’ 2009 and Dickman 2009c.
See Dickman 2009b.
Elsewhere Gadamer writes, ‘…this is the real and fundamental nature of a question: namely to make things indeterminate. Questions always bring out the undetermined possibilities of a thing’ (Gadamer 2004, p. 367). Coltman translates Gadamer this way: ‘Such bringing-into-suspension… is the proper and original essence of questioning. Questioning always allows the possibilities of a situation to be seen in suspension’ (Coltman 1998, p. 109). The following is the original German: ‘…solches In-die-Schwebe-bringen ist das eigene und ursprüngliche Wesen des Fragens. Fragen läßt immer in der Schwebe befindliche Möglichkeiten sehen’ (Gadamer 1965, p. 357).
The type of wonder I am isolating here is in part corroborated by Chretien’s reflections on the call of Beauty. See Chretien 2004.
See also Grondin 1994, p. 38.
For further elaboration, see Dickman 2014.
I think of Socrates in the marketplace here. Cf. Vanhoozer 1997.
My edit is merited by virtue of Chretien’s statements about the call that follow below. For example, Chretien writes, ‘The question and call are one’ (2004, p. 48).
Cf. Butler 2005.
See Heidegger on the call and ‘guilt’ below.
As Chretien emphasizes, we leave open the possibilities of the ‘caller’ (2004, p. 42).
I do not think that it does. As Gadamer indicates, when we participate in conversation and shared questioning we are trying to understand not the other, but what she says (Gadamer 2004, p. 387). This respects the autonomy of the other without objectifying the other as lower or higher than one. Rather than symmetry or asymmetry, this is a matter of synergy.
See also Chretien 2004, p. 70.
Cf. Levinas 1998b, p. 107.
Heidegger claims that, ‘The posing of the question includes two things: (1) the definite indication of what is put into question, what is interrogated; [and] (2) the indication of that with regards to which what is interrogated is interrogated—what is asked about’ (Heidegger 2000, p. 24).
There are, however, technically three crucial dimensions of a question: (a) the activity of questioning (Fragen), (b) the subject matter which orients the activity (ein Gefragtes), and (c) the interrogated object through which the activity is fulfilled when the search is completed (ein Befragtes) (ibid.). The original German is as follows: ‘Jedes Fragen ist ein Suchen. Jedes Suchen hat sein vorgängiges Geleit aus dem Gesuchen her. Fragen ist erkennendes Suchen des Seienden in seinem Daß- und Sosein. Das erkennende Suchen kann zum »Untersuchen« warden als dem freilegenden Bestimmen dessen, wonach die Frage steht. Das Fragen hat als Fragen nach…sein Gefragtes. Alles Fragen nach…ist in irgendeiner Weise Anfragen bei…Zum Fragen gehört außer dem Gefragten ein Befragtes. In der untersuchenden, d. h. spezifisch theoretischen Frage soll das Gefragte bestimmt und zu Begriff gebracht warden. Im Gefragten liegt dann als das eigentlich Intendierte das Erfragte, das, wobei das Fragen ins Ziel kommt. Das Fragen selbst hat als Verhalten eines Seienden, des Fragers, einen eigenen Charakter des Seins. Ein Fragen kann vollzogen warden als »Nur-so-hin-fragen« oder als explizite Fragestellung. Das Eigentümliche dieser liegt darin, daß das Fragen sich zuvor nach all den genannten konstitutiven Charakteren der Frage selbst durchsichtig wird’ (Heidegger 1977, p. 7). See Klemm 1987, p. 449.
For a closer examination of the differences on questioning between Levinas and Heidegger (through Tillich as a proxy for Heidegger), see Dickman 2009a.
I have examined this phenomena in religious literature elsewhere (Dickman 2016a).
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Dickman, N.E. Call or Question: a Rehabilitation of Conscience as Dialogical. SOPHIA 57, 275–294 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0588-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0588-7